Launched on Tuesday to an overwhelmingly (though, ahem, not universally) positive critical reception, epic first-person shooter Halo: Reach has made a staggering $200m (£128m) in its first day on sale.

The title, exclusively available on the Xbox 360 console, beat the three-day opening weekends of blockbusting movies like Iron Man 2 and Toy Story 3, making it the biggest entertainment release of the year so far. In the UK, the title shifted 330,000 copies in the opening 24 hours with dozens of stores opening at midnight to allow Halo fans an early taste of operatic sci-fi action.

It'll be interesting to see if Activision can eclipse this extraordinary figure with the much-anticipated release of Call of Duty: Black Ops on 9 November. That title will be the first in the CoD series since the gigantically successful Modern Warfare 2 – and it's on multiple platforms.

Whatever the case, it's good news for the beliguired UK games industry which has seen games sales dropping to pre-Wii levels. It's also a nice little publicity coup for Microsoft in the week that Sony launches its PlayStation Move controller.